


30 Minutes Over Kandahar

by Vulgarweed



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Animagus Bestiality, F/M, Mile High Club, Oxygen Deprivation, Random Location
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-16
Updated: 2010-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-06 08:57:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/51907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulgarweed/pseuds/Vulgarweed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why are flying carpets banned by the British Ministry of Magic? Perhaps a holdover from the "Great Game"? Warnings for gratuitous political potshots, flagrant abuse of timeline, physics, and atmospheric sciences. A 2006 birthday fic for CatherineCookMN.</p>
            </blockquote>





	30 Minutes Over Kandahar

“It’s pure xenophobia,” Minerva said. “A colonial holdover – White Wizard’s Burden and all that rot.”

“No, it’s just trade protectionism,” Severus said. They’d had this dispute twice already, once they’d learned that brooms weren’t going to do the job and Apparition and Portkeys had strict controls they couldn’t avoid undercover. "The broom-maker's lobby's pockets are deeper than anyone's."

“More comfortable,” she said, shifting on the intricately patterned carpet in a way that made it lurch in a way he didn’t like at all.

“Less maneuverable.”

“It takes less effort to get the hang of at first than a broom. And perhaps some of our nervous fliers at school wouldn’t have as much trouble if they can just pretend they’re lying on a nice hearthrug in front of the fire.”

“Bit chilly for that,” Snape said. “I don’t see the point of coddling them anyway.”

“Of course you don’t. But your terrorising methods don’t work in every field, you know.”

They were several thousand feet above the barren grey mountains of Samarkanistan, the ancient Wizard nation whose boundaries hadn’t matched its Muggle ones since the one called Tamur died in its capital city some seven centuries past, or so the official story went. Albus Dumbledore had known different; his friend Flamel had believed that the old warlord had left the scroll of his secret, a Horcrux a thousand times over, sealed in impermeable gold, Transfigured again and again and cloaked and poisoned with the darkest potions of the Orient, at the bottom of the Aral Sea.

What a wild goose chase that had been. The canny old bastard must have gone south instead, which was why the greatest Transfigurations expert and greatest Potions scientist Britain could muster were doing much the same, in a thin-aired chill that belied the heat of the desert below.

“India’s another misdirection, you know,” Snape grumbled. “I would have thought better of you, falling for that.”

“Falling for what? It’s the next stage in the search. Mind you, I don’t think for a minute that fortuneteller knew what he was talking about, but following the legends always leads somewhere.”

“I’m sure it’s in the Himalayas.”

“Yes, where all ancient wisdom goes to die. Really, that’s terribly _Quibbler_ of you.”

Snape snorted. “I wasn’t aware the Lovegoods were directing covert Order missions now.”

Minerva gave the carpet’s fringe a slight tug on the right front side. “We’ll have to swing to the south now, I’d like to avoid the Muggle American airspace as much as possible.”

“Oh, and I was so looking forward to seeing beautiful Kabul,” Snape said sardonically. “I’m sure they’ve improved it.”

“You have no social conscience,” Minerva said. “Don’t pretend you do.”

“Have they found their bearded bogeyman yet?” he said. “Speaking of devout _Quibbler_ readers.”

“Well, according to that imaginative rag he’s a Yeti animagus capable of surviving for a hundred years alone in the mountains, so it’s a safe bet they never will.”

“Speaking of mountains, the air’s getting thinner.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Minerva sighed as the carpet rose higher over the wrinkled, poking peaks of the Hindu Kush. She stretched languorously and transformed, her silver tabby form having far less weight and using far less oxygen, with a totally different center of gravity. Snape would have to do most of the steering. She reminded herself that her Quidditch skills (which she still kept honed, thank you very much) didn’t count for a lot on the flying carpet, which rolled and pitched in its own particular way that was unlike any broom.

He still wasn’t much of a driver. Minerva thought if she was going to be sick, better to do it in the form that would result only in a discreet hairball hacking on the fine black wool. Oh, but it was cold up here. It was good to have a fur coat.

She had once been entertained by a handsome Muggleborn wizard who’d stayed enough in contact with his native culture to be up on various innovations, like the fashionable-at-the-time waterbed. She liked the theory but not the practise – its sloshing was a bit disconcerting, not to mention very difficult to get any decent leverage.

It was a long way to Kalighat still, though, and thin air or not it was unlikely she’d get any sleep to pass the time. She lifted her head a little and burrowed a little deeper into Severus’s lap. His thin thighs made a sweet shelter, warm and surprisingly sturdy-seeming to her smaller self. Settling in further, she could not help but purr--loudly and energetically, vibrating against him with comfortable abandon.

“Minerva…” he said, warning. “Oxygen.”

If she could have spoken, she would have reminded him that a Bubble-Head Charm was a third-year spell.

She looked up at him with her bright green eyes, pupils widening in the darkness of his robes. The look was quite clear and direct.

He sighed, wasting more air, and obliged. He petted her. She settled in further, vibrating.

There are things which are simply _not done._ And there are things which _are_ done, but in the right time and the right place. However, there is also a perfectly perverse serendipity to be found in something that is not done at precisely the wrong place and time, which is how Severus Snape came to find himself gasping for air that wasn’t there as a tiny, pink, sandpapery tongue attached to a feline face burrowed himself under his robes and was licking him someplace where it really oughtn’t feel as good as it did, several thousand feet over the country Muggles call Afghanistan and wizards don’t.

The flying carpet undulated slightly, and Snape wasn’t sure where arousal ended and vertigo began, and oh Merlin he would never let just any cat do this!

“Minerva—“ he choked, trying to keep steady enough to angle the carpet slightly downward, hoping a few hundred feet less of altitude might clear his head.

The only answer was a slight scratch to the thigh.

The tongue was little and rough and moist and busy, and just for one horrible instant Severus began to see himself as the sort of pervert who smeared tunafish all over the head of his cock in the hope of getting lucky. This was _disgusting._ But her fur was warm and soft and she slid her little paws (claws thankfully sheathed) into the tender valleys between his balls and his inner thighs and kneaded gently.

The carpet had no comment but a straightening-out and spreading as it caught a thermal and soared. It was going to be covered in cat hair when this was all over.

The roughness of her tongue was starting to be a bit irritating beneath the pleasure of it, and Severus was thinking that she’d better not expect _reciprocation_ in that form.

She sighed, as eloquently as a human, and backed away a little, stretching and changing. Her human form had her robe open, nipples hardening in the chill, clean air, and she climbed back into his lap, almost gracefully.

He opened his mouth and then realised he had nothing to say but her name and he had said it too many times already.

Blasted Gryffindor recklessness, in which any dangerous situation could turn on the juices at the worst possible moment, and blast Minerva’s stern irresistibility. She twined around him like a smooth Devil’s Snare, one hand working his cock with the steady skill born of practise, the other guiding his hand between her thighs.

The carpet struggled to straighten itself.

The motion of it as she panted and undulated against him was close to causing seasickness. Severus closed his eyes and pretended he was on a mountain instead, or on a bed in a tower, or anything with slightly more substance beneath them than thousands of feet of hostile desert air.

She closed hers too, for a different reason, his fingers twirling and crossing inside her, little wet sounds against the roar of the wind.

Her thumb played with the moisture at the head of his prick, spreading and smearing over buttery skin, and he shivered and moaned into her neck, his mouth full of her hair. She grasped at the fabric of his robes and lifted herself up a little in his lap, her commanding hand positioning his erection just where she wanted it.

Snape shamed himself with a girly yelp when the carpet pitched a bit in protest, and Minerva smothered his shaking with her mouth, using her tongue to give him some idea of what she wanted him to do to her below. She smiled and shifted and settled upon him, velvet lips enclosing his prick with a lush slide, and thighs wrapped as tightly around his lower back as she could squeeze them, rocking rather too energetically for their mode of transport.

The sky spun and swirled, and oh bloody hell it was good, she so adamant and demanding, her usual mask of wry calm giving way to a feral strain as she rode him harder and harder and he couldn’t help but grasp her round arse underneath the robes and move her in counterpoint. The carpet was not accommodating. It gave way at the wrong times and held rigid at the wrong times, and ruffled its fringes affrontedly as though what it was being asked to do was simply too much, no matter how many storms it had flown through and war zones it had flown over.

Did they think it was some kind of _brothel_ rug?

Snape was finding that the flying carpet’s upsetting give was allowing him more freedom than he’d normally have in this position, which was good, and also that there was nothing solid to brace against, which wasn’t. He gave a forgetful wild thrust deep into her, and beneath him the carpet bent so much it nearly snapped up all around them and plunged them all a cold few hundred feet. _All right. Won’t do that again._

It didn’t make him want to stop. Nor did the thinness of the air, which was coming to remind him of the time she had closed her hand around his throat as he came, which was…

Dizzying in more ways than mere altitude.

She was moving faster and harder now, panting for air that wasn’t quite there, and biting his neck in frustration. He clutched her against him with long hands encircling her rump, pressing her against that spot he knew she liked. Her grip on him was hard enough he could let his hands roam, fingertips down between her legs from behind, touching the place they were joined and moaning against her hair as he brushed the base of his own cock pinned inside her. He gathered up trails of the thick wetness there, and slipped up around to her tighter, unoccupied entrance, there pressing his point home until she gasped.

“Severus…oh _Merlin…”_

“Right…the first time,” he panted. Good to know she wasn’t pretending he was someone still living at any rate. He stabbed his finger into her, just a little roughly. She moaned loudly. Her muscles clenched around him – his finger and his cock at once, and he shuddered. He wasn’t going to last much longer, and as she ground himself against him a little erratically, trying to find a rhythm for the double penetration, the different directions, the conflicting signals, he hoped she’d even beat him there.

She fucking _loved_ it, if her movements were any indication; they were.

The carpet at least wasn’t fighting them anymore, pushing back against them grudgingly as if offering support (literally) for getting it over with.

There she was now. _There._ All wetness and tightness and that maddening scent, rubbing herself against the base of his belly, and to feel the process of her oncoming spasms, twice over, was dazzling, overwhelming. Her clenches and flutters were it, it, the whole reason for…he kept moving, working the last of it out of her, her shaking going on and on. Just before he thought it would be over, her eyes flew open, dilated and fierce. She relaxed for a moment then tightened her thighs, snarling just a little and showing her fine sharp teeth.

“…want to feel _you_ come…” she muttered in a voice rich and thick.

Frightening. She could suck all the thoughts out of his head with a whisper. Command his body to notice what his mind hadn’t: he was _there_ already, squeezing her hip violently, driving up into her and ignoring the carpet sinking against the force of his knees. Losing it. Giving it. The fucking rug could crumple and he wouldn’t notice, sky already spinning, eyes squeezing shut to plummet into sensation like a hexed broom in freefall.

He wasn’t just imagining things. The carpet was messing with them. That was at least 300 feet of drop, it had to have been.

“Is that why the Ministry’s banned them?” he murmured aloud.

“Because people having sex on them will make the air traffic problem over London worse than it is?” smiled Minerva, cheek pressed to his.

“I was speaking of the random freefalls.”

“Brooms do that too—if one doesn’t know what one is doing.” Snape started to growl something rude, but Minerva forestalled him with a finger to his lips. “You have other talents.”

“It is an improvement over trying to do it on a broom, I’ll admit.”

They were over Lahore when they began losing altitude on purpose.


End file.
